U.S. Plans Radio Free Serbia in Bid to Weaken Milosevic

The Clinton Administration has approved the launch of Radio Free Serbia, a U.S.-funded radio service aimed at weakening Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic by breaking his near-monopoly on Yugoslavia’s media, officials said Sunday.

The new radio service, an addition to the Radio Free Europe network that broadcast to the Soviet satellite states during the Cold War, is expected to be on the air by the end of the summer.

Administration officials said they hope the new radio station will help democratic political forces in Serbia, where Milosevic has used increasingly authoritarian measures to stifle opposition to his rule.

Officials at Radio Free Europe said the broadcasts will not be explicitly aimed against Milosevic but will try to provide objective information about events in the former Yugoslav federation, just as the service’s other stations did during the Cold War.

“We’re very pleased,” said Dan Mica, chairman of the Board for International Broadcasting, which oversees Radio Free Europe. “This will enable us to give the people of Serbia a source of reliable information.”

The service will be the first expansion of Radio Free Europe broadcasting to new conflict areas of the post-Cold War world. The Administration is also planning a new “Democracy Radio” network for China and other authoritarian-ruled Asian countries, but that project will take longer to get under way.

The decision to launch the new stations also will help the Administration combat charges that it has failed to take action against Serbia for sponsoring ethnic Serbian military forces in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, officials said.

The new service will broadcast in two languages, Serbo-Croatian (spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro) and Albanian (spoken by the ethnic Albanian population in the Serbian province of Kosovo).

Initially, the broadcasts will be available only on shortwave bands, but Radio Free Europe hopes to move eventually to the more widely used medium-wave band as well. Medium-wave broadcasts require more powerful transmitters located close to the target area.

Funding for the new service will come from Radio Free Europe’s existing $220-million budget.

Officials at the network’s headquarters in Munich, Germany, noted that the broadcasts are unlikely to change attitudes in Serbia in the short run.

“We like to talk about our success in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but that took 40 years, and there wasn’t a war going on,” one radio executive said. “In Serbia, you have a situation where people’s attitudes have already hardened to the point where it’s a killing zone. People have already chosen up sides.”

Radio Free Europe first proposed adding Serbo-Croatian broadcasts to its service more than a year ago, but the idea was blocked by a series of policy disputes.

The main obstacle was a long-running argument between the Voice of America, which is run by the government’s U.S. Information Agency, and Radio Free Europe, which is semi-independent, over which organization would survive the Cold War.

The Clinton Administration ended the dispute last week by proposing to merge the two radio networks under a single, quasi-independent governing board.